Reading the fine print

December 6th, 2007

I watched Mike Moore’s Sicko last night and was stunned, again, by the cynicism of this country [and empathize with the writer of the last sentence in the last piece posted here] — the ability of its businessmen and corporations to turn off their humanity in order to run the profit numbers higher. A friend and I discussed it afterward, pondering the simplicity of the notion that we should “take care of one another.” It’s what we learned in kindergarten, what our mothers told us to do. I think of my daughter, when she’s exasperated by her kids squabbling — and her stern command to “Be kind!” Are there American mothers out there instructing their children to “screw the bejesus” out of their playmates and sibs? If not, how’d we get here?

PR has to take a bow as one of the culprits. I remember getting my “education” in advertising as a kid, having used my horded allowance to purchase something from a catalogue — when it arrived, it looked nothing like the picture. It’s trickier these days — Wyatt and I were looking at a toy in a store a couple of weeks ago and while I was marveling at all the things it could do, Wy flipped over the bubble pack and said, “Read here, Grammie.” The fine print; he’ll manage — at 8, he’s already a disenchanted consumer.

How sad that is! I think about my grandkids, born into a world where the planet is endangered by global warming, the animals they delight in are endangered by the probability of extinction — where war is the daily fare, where there is not only “no free lunch,” but somebody with a contract, an employment application or a “pie in the sky” promise is standing by to try to eat yours. It’s no wonder we’re lethargic — our young people are disenchanted, our middle class is demoralized and our elders are disgusted. What a mess we’ve made of the Founders vision … and the Golden Rule.

With an amoral president solidly behind a system of rogue capitalism, and a system gone so blatantly out of kilter that we can’t even guard our children from exposure to lead or assume our food is safe, we can rightly assume that we no longer have a government dedicated to the “commonwealth.” The public is just a bunch of rubes to be manipulated — the last piece here is a Froomkin report that does the heavy lifting on how the Bushy Iran dialogues carefully changed over the months after he became aware of the intelligence out of Iran; cynicism of not just the immoral sort, but in my view, impeachable. It’s your bonus read today — and we called Dick “tricky,” Big Bill “slick!” Ha!

Here’s a collection of news that illustrates the problem; Bush fiddles with the collapsed housing bubble and from what we know about this “compassionate” Conservative, there’s fine print we don’t know about and we can safely assume it’s covering his own ass. You’ll find reads on the war budget, the Pentagon’s policies and PharmCo, as well. None of them will make you smile.

As a closing thought, the political candidates I can bear to listen to, in this current race, are the ones who are realistic about this country — I cringe at the patriotic crappola about how stunning we are; we may have waved that flag once, and rightly, but it’s no longer true. The majority of sleepers out there don’t know that — they have nothing to compare it to; if they did … if they watched Sicko and sat around discussing it for awhile, discovered their isolation as regards governmental support systems, maybe that would hasten their political awakening.

We may be Number 1 in our own mind, but … nowhere else. Eric wrote a piece that speaks to that — you’ll find it here. And if our mindless consumerism … not just of things, but of people and greedy, aggressive ideas … is the product of having too much to pick from, too much to lust after, too much to buy with, perhaps the cosmos has another idea in mind. We learn hard … sadly.

Jude

Bush Wins Agreement To Freeze Mortgages
Hard-Up Owners Won’t See Adjustable Rates Soar
David Cho and Neil Irwin, WaPo
Thursday, December 6, 2007

President Bush will announce this afternoon an agreement with major mortgage firms to freeze interest rates for five years for financially troubled homeowners — a plan advocates say will help forestall a major foreclosure crisis but some conservatives say amounts to a bailout of people who made bad financial decisions.

The plan would apply to homeowners who got adjustable-rate subprime mortgages between Jan. 1, 2005, and July 31 of this year and are facing a sharp jump in their rates before July 31, 2010. It would also offer to put them on a fast track to refinance their mortgages through lenders or through state and local housing authorities, according to several people briefed on the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal has not been officially announced.

Eligible homeowners are those with enough income to pay their mortgages at lower rates but not so wealthy that they could afford the increase in monthly payments. The plan would be offered only to people who live in their homes, an effort to exclude real estate investors and speculators.

On Capitol Hill yesterday, some Republican lawmakers and their aides expressed concern that the plan would anger homeowners and others who stayed out of the subprime mortgage mess.

Darren McKinney, 48, a renter in the District, said he has been waiting for housing prices to fall so he can buy a condo without resorting to a dubious loan. He turned down an opportunity to buy his 600-square-foot apartment for $310,000 in late 2004 because he thought it was “absurdly overpriced.”

Now the government is rewarding people who made irresponsible decisions and bought homes beyond their means, he said.

“There are those of us who purposely sat on the sidelines during the course of the last three years while the senseless frenzy was going on, and we presumed the free market would be allowed to correct itself,” McKinney said. “The government is now meddling in the market and looking to prop up lenders and borrowers alike, and those of us who wisely bided our time get screwed.”

Others said the government needs to help financially troubled homeowners to prevent the mortgage mess from taking down the broader economy.

“Very large losses have already happened,” said Alex J. Pollock, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. “We can’t somehow stop them from happening because they’ve already happened. You need to go through an adjustment and a repricing.” Pollack said whether the new plan makes sense depends on its details.

The mortgage crisis erupted this year after declining housing prices triggered near-record delinquencies and foreclosures around the country. The impact roiled Wall Street as the value of securities backed by these mortgages plummeted, damaging earnings at major financial institutions. Lending, which had boomed for years, ground to a halt.

Several efforts by Congress to ease the crisis have stalled in committee. Yesterday, lawmakers expressed concern over the accountability of nonprofit groups that would receive public funds under the administration’s plan. Some taxpayer money — about $200 million — would go to nonprofit groups staffing a national credit-counseling hotline for troubled homeowners. Some Republicans worried that about the expanding role of local housing authorities, which can be difficult to police.

But it appears no tax dollars will be used to subsidize the freeze on interest rates. That cost would be borne primarily by lenders and investors, and by homeowners who may have to pay a fee to modify their loans. The details will be released today.

The administration’s plan appears to be winning support on both sides of the aisle. And perhaps as importantly, it has backing from key private-sector players, including nonprofit groups, mortgage lenders such as Countrywide Financial and big banks such as Citigroup.

The five-year freeze represents a compromise among banking regulators, who wanted it to last seven years, and mortgage firms and banks, which argued it should be one or two years.

An analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said Bush’s plan is bad policy.

“In some ways it’s worse than a taxpayer bailout,” said John Berlau, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the institute. “It pressures an industry to essentially alter the terms of millions of contracts, and it’s going to make investors think twice about investing in America again.”

Others, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), criticized the plan for not going far enough. Yesterday, the Democratic presidential candidate called for a moratorium of at least 90 days on subprime mortgage borrowers facing foreclosure and a five-year rate freeze on all subprime loans.

“Although the administration is finally giving the foreclosure crisis the attention it deserves, it seems that President Bush is going to give struggling homeowners far less than they need,” Clinton said in a statement.

On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. endorsed another plan at a briefing with members of the Senate Finance Committee that would temporarily let government-chartered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac insure mortgages above their current limit. This would allow home buyers to get loans higher than $417,000 without paying higher “jumbo” rates, according to people at the briefing.

Paulson wants to tie this action to a broader overhaul of Fannie and Freddie, said Jennifer Zuccarelli, a Treasury spokeswoman.

The President’s Cynical Budget War
NYT Editorial
December 6, 2007

President Bush’s lame-duck attempt to repair the Republican Party’s threadbare fiscal reputation is an increasingly reckless game. In the latest exercise of irresponsibility for political gain, Mr. Bush reportedly wants to slash counterterrorism funding for front-line police and firefighters.

The administration’s own Homeland Security agency requested $3.2 billion for this first responder aid to high-risk cities and states in the 2009 budget — the one that Mr. Bush’s successor will inherit. The White House is considering cutting that request by more than half to $1.4 billion by eliminating grants for port and public transit security, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

While Mr. Bush wrestles with more responsible members of his own administration, his larger and more immediate game is to portray the narrow Democratic majority in Congress as feckless overspenders.

In October, he vetoed a sensible bill that would have provided health insurance for millions of uninsured children. In the name of faux fiscal discipline, he is threatening to veto budget measures that the nation needs for effective government.

Mr. Bush is clearly hoping that the public will somehow forget that he is the one who spent the last seven years running up huge deficits and debt with his off-the-books war in Iraq and serial tax cuts customized for his affluent political base. Mr. Bush’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill are also hoping that the voters will forget how they abetted the president through all those years. Those fiscal turncoats are now scrambling to pose once more as budget hawks to survive in next year’s watershed election.

The differences between the Democrats’ spending bills and Mr. Bush’s budget are not that large. And the Democrats are offering to split the difference. But Mr. Bush isn’t interested in compromise.

He’s decided the real political traction comes with manufactured standoffs and blame-the-Congress gridlock. And he clearly doesn’t care who suffers — the nation’s vulnerable cities or vulnerable children without health insurance.

As the White House plays out its cyncial scenario, loyalists are flinching.

“This isn’t a bridge to nowhere. We’re talking about life and death,” Representative Peter King of New York, the top Republican on the House’s Homeland Security Committee, warned of first-responder cuts. Having played along so far with the grand Bush strategy, Mr. King is alarmed now and threatening to vote against sustaining future vetoes.

Republicans sweating political survival beyond Mr. Bush’s desperate endgame would be wise to follow Mr. King’s lead, not the president’s.

Military Recruitment Lie: Pentagon’s Education Pitch is a Scam
Aaron Glantz, The Nation via Alternet
December 6, 2007

“Join the military and go to college.” That’s what the recruiters say.

But the deal that today’s servicemen and servicewomen get is a far cry from what their fathers and grandfathers got. When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law in the waning days of World War II, he saw it as part of his New Deal program. The law, officially called the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, promised returning veterans that the government would pay the full cost of tuition and books at any public or private college or job-training program. It also provided unemployment insurance and loans to buy homes and start businesses.

By contrast, the current Montgomery GI Bill, passed in 1984, asks active duty members to accept a pay reduction of $100 per month through twelve months of military service. When they return to school, they receive $1,100 monthly for a maximum of three years of education benefits. It’s an amount that doesn’t come close to covering the cost of a modern college education, but it does help some veterans–if they can get through the red tape.

In July 2005, 23-year-old Paris Lee was honorably discharged after serving almost three years in the Army. A native of California’s rural, picturesque North Coast where the old-growth redwoods grow, he returned home and enrolled in a free ten-week college prep program called Veterans Upward Bound at Humboldt State University. Lee was preparing to attend Humboldt State in the fall, but this past May he received a letter from the Department of Veterans Affairs denying his application for the GI Bill. “They said I’m not eligible because I served thirty-five months and two days in the Army,” he told me. “Normally you have to serve thirty-six months to get education benefits, so they’re trying to deny me based on twenty-eight days.” After the VA rejected Lee’s application for GI benefits, he sent an appeal letter to the VA regional office in Muskogee, Oklahoma. While he waits for the response, the Army veteran works dealing cards for blackjack, Pai Gow and Texas hold ‘em games at Blue Lake Indian Casino east of Arcata.

According to the VA, those seeking to activate their GI Bill benefits must fill out a twelve-page form, which is eventually submitted to the college or university of choice. It’s not uncommon for a veteran to receive letters requesting more information, and VA questions must be answered to the department’s satisfaction. A notice of eligibility usually takes four to eight weeks.

With an application process like that, it’s little wonder that, according to the Department of Education, veterans are much less likely to graduate from college than students who have never served in the military. The department’s most recent data show just 3 percent of veterans who entered a four-year college program in 1995 graduated by 2001, compared with a 30 percent overall graduation rate.

Another reason for that gap is the military experience itself. The Pentagon sells an educational dream to recruits. In addition to promising tens of thousands of dollars for a service member’s college education, recruiters promise future soldiers that they’ll be able to “attend college anywhere they are based and even in the combat zone through Internet classes offered from the college they are enrolled in.”

But most Iraq War veterans say that’s a promise that exists only on paper. They say it’s difficult to study in the military–especially in combat zones. Take 23-year-old Alejandro Rocha. The Los Angeles native joined the military in 2002. After graduating from high school, he had started to drift, and when his father’s hours got cut from his job in a pen factory, Rocha dropped out of community college and took a minimum-wage job loading and unloading merchandise at Macy’s. “I wanted to escape,” he told me. “The money wasn’t good, and I said to myself, I can’t just be doing this my whole life. So I joined the Marine Corps. They sent me on three tours in Iraq.” Rocha was assigned to an infantry unit and spent most of his five-year commitment either in Iraq or in training. After taking part in the initial invasion in 2003, he was called back for the brutal siege of Falluja in November 2004 (more than 100 Americans and 4,000 Iraqis died in that battle). In 2005, he was back in Falluja.

“I don’t know how they expect us to take classes in Iraq,” he said. “Maybe some people can. Maybe some people have desk jobs, but I was a machine-gunner. I manned Humvees and rolled around in Humvees, patrolling. Sometimes we went house to house…door by door and knocking down doors. When we were back in the US, we were just training and training. It wasn’t really part of my job to study.”

A different set of issues confronts America’s “weekend warriors,” members of the National Guard and Reserve. As of June there were about 90,000 US military reservists enrolled in college, and about 25,000 of them have been deployed at least once to Iraq or Afghanistan. Juggling school and military service isn’t easy. Just ask Marine Corps reservist Todd Bowers. He was halfway through a degree in Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University when the Pentagon pulled him out of school and sent him on two combat tours to Iraq. On October 17, 2004, Bowers was shot in the face while patrolling the outskirts of Falluja. A sniper’s round had penetrated the scope Bowers was using and sent fragments into the left side of his face. When he returned, he found his student loans had been sent to collection.

“I had notified my lenders that I was leaving on a combat deployment,” he said. “Something went awry while I was gone, and [when I returned] I had tremendous amounts of letters saying, You owe this money.” Eventually, Bowers said, he was able to get the difficulty resolved, “but the damage had already been done, and my credit history was ruined.”

Under federal law, there are no protections guaranteeing that a school must accommodate a student/soldier who’s been deployed. Universities and colleges are not required to readmit students when they return from overseas or to refund tuition for soldiers pulled out mid-semester–and they are even allowed to flunk students if they’re not attending classes because they’ve been sent to Iraq.

Bowers dropped out of school. He works as government affairs director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the first and largest member-organization for US veterans of recent wars. In June IAVA persuaded Congresswoman Susan Davis (D-San Diego) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to introduce a bill called the VETS Act, which would require colleges to refund tuition for service members sent overseas, cap student loan interest payments at 6 percent while the students are deployed and extend the period of time during which student/soldiers may re-enroll after returning from abroad. Veterans groups are optimistic about the bill’s chances for passage; but like most legislation geared toward veterans, Congressional leaders have put it on the back burner while they argue about how and whether to fight the Iraq War.

Other, more ambitious efforts appear to be headed for much less success. In January, newly elected Democratic Senator James Webb of Virginia (one of a handful of Congress members to have a son or daughter serving in Iraq), introduced legislation to create a new GI Bill called the Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act that would provide college tuition, room and board and a $1,000 monthly stipend to veterans who have served at least two years of active duty since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Webb noted that the benefits in his bill essentially mirror the widely popular benefits allowed under the nation’s original GI bill. According to a 1986 Congressional Research Office study, each dollar invested in the World War II GI Bill yielded $5 to $12 in tax revenues, the result of increased taxes paid by veterans who achieved higher incomes made possible by a college education. “That bill helped spark economic growth and expansion for a whole generation of Americans,” Webb told Congress. “As the post-World War II experience so clearly indicated, better educated veterans have higher income levels, which in the long run will increase tax revenues.”

Unfortunately, Webb’s colleagues didn’t share his enthusiasm for veterans’ education. The Bush Administration quickly declared its opposition to the bill, warning it would cost tens of billions of dollars and would prove cumbersome to administer. Republican senators agreed, and the bill has not made it out of committee.

In short, the government’s approach is not to benefit veterans, but to make the benefits of service seem attractive to soldiers when they enlist, while extracting as little money as possible from the federal Treasury. Today’s GI Bill is not so much a ticket to college but a recruiting tool that can be used to persuade skeptical young people to join the military.

The Secret History of the War on Cancer | Book Review
[from the Planet Waves front page]

Some books make you proud to be human. This is not one of them. Nor is it a book to read all at once, especially not at bedtime, lest suicide begin to appear downright comforting. One by one, with surgical precision, Davis dissects and shreds every illusion we’ve ever cherished about the altruism of medicine or the integrity of science. Eric’s environmental mentor, Ma Kettle, reviews the Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis…

The Many Faces of Big Pharma’s Disease Mongering
Martha Rosenberg, Common Dreams
Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Most people blame Big Pharma and the docs in its pocket for elevating everyday anxiety to depression, depression to bipolar disease and childhood behavior problems to major psychiatric diseases.

But there are others to thank for the national pathology of creating and treating diseases that aren’t even there.

There’s the 200 US medical education and communication companies (MECCs) who ghostwrite journal articles for Big Pharma–”just sign here, Doc; we’ve reviewed the data”–for $20,000 to $40,000 per article.

Like Complete Healthcare Communications (CHC) whose phalanx of 40 medical writers, editors and librarians has submitted over 500 manuscripts to journals for clients Pfizer, Sanofi-Aventis, Wyeth, Schering-Plough and AstraZeneca according to its promotional materials, with an acceptance rate of 80 percent.

And the MECC which wrote up the Merck-designed and paid for Vioxx trials less the death data which ran in Annals of Internal Medicine first author of the Advantage study Jeffrey Lisse recounts to the New York Times.

And of course there are the medical journals themselves which can make $450,000 off one article reprint as Big Pharma disseminates its messages under their masthead (”look, Doc–it says RIGHT HERE”) and untold ad page revenues.

In 2006 Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) editor in chief Dr. Catherine DeAngelis had to apologize for Big Pharma tainted articles defending antidepressants during pregnancy and linking migraine with coronary risks in women. The docs were getting money from antidepressant and heart medication manufacturers respectively. But ten months later she ran a pro Fosamax–a Merck drug–article about a study “designed jointly by the non-Merck investigators and Merck employees” and “supported by contracts with Merck and Co.”

Three Merck authors on the study disclosed they potentially owned Merck “stock and/or stock options” and the article’s 11 other authors disclosed 40 research grants, consultancies and other financial relationships with drug companies including Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Roche, SmithGlaxoKline, Wyeth, Novartis, Procter & Gamble and Merck.

Last summer the AMA was also criticized for earning $50 million a year selling the names, office addresses and practice types to data miners and detailers the better with which to sell doctors drugs.

Hey, doctors can opt out of the program says the AMA.

Of course advertising and public relations agencies have also helped the national thrall to Big Pharma by portraying a bad day as a Prozac deficiency, unruly children as Ritalin deficiencies, insomnia as an Ambien deficiency and old age as a hormone deficiency.

Slick PR firm, Cohn and Wolfe, is credited with vaulting “shyness” to a national psychiatric problem the answer for which is Paxil and creating faux grassroots patient groups like Freedom From Fear to push their clients’ drugs.

And Wyeth’s ad agency serenaded the nation with the message in its The Change You Deserve campaign that if we were not enjoying things the way we used to do, if we were lacking in what agencies used to call get-up-and-go, it was time to go on the antidepressant Effexor.

But Mr. and Ms. Plasma TV Screen are not off the hook either.

As long people ask themselves, “I wonder if I have Restless Legs Syndrome?” “Excessive Sleepiness?” “Intermittent Explosive Disorder?” they’ve taken the bait.

As long as people derive more of a thrill out of dosing and experimenting on themselves–in spite of the dangerous side effects and sometimes because of them–than having a life in which they define the problems and answers, Big Pharma has its living room lab animals.

Bonus Read

A Pattern of Deception
Dan Froomkin, WaPo
Wednesday, December 5, 2007

President Bush changed the way he talked about Iran in August: He stopped making explicit assertions about the existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program.

On Monday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a new national intelligence estimate in which the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies concluded that Iran suspended its nuclear weapons program four years ago — a dramatic rejection of an earlier set of findings.

Bush yesterday said he was only briefed about the new estimate last week.

But a close examination of his word choice over the past year suggests that he learned something around August that got him to stop making claims that were apparently no longer supported by American intelligence.

Instead of directly condemning Iranian leaders for pursuing nuclear weapons, he started more vaguely accusing them of seeking the knowledge necessary to make such a weapon.

As he did that, he and the vice president accelerated their rhetorical efforts to persuade the public that the nuclear threat posed by Iran was grave and urgent. Bush even went so far in late August and October as to warn of the potential for a nuclear holocaust.

Indeed, a careful parsing of Bush’s words indicates that, while not saying anything that could later prove to be demonstrably false, Bush left his listeners with what he likely knew was a fundamentally false impression. And he did so in the pursuit of a more muscular and possibly even military approach to a Middle Eastern country.

It’s an oddly familiar pattern of deception.

Bush’s Changing Words

A survey of Bush’s remarks about Iran’s nuclear ambitions in 2007 suggests that a shift took place somewhere between August 6 and August 9. There wasn’t a change in his overall message, just his carefully chosen words.

Here’s Bush on Jan. 26: “As you know, the Iranians, for example, think they want to have a nuclear weapon. And we’ve convinced other nations to join us to send a clear message, through the United Nations, that that’s unacceptable behavior.”

On March 31: “Our position is that we would hope that nations would be very careful in dealing with Iran, particularly since Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon, and a major threat to world peace is if the Iranians had a nuclear weapon. . . .

“We respect the history of Iran, we respect the rich traditions of Iran. We, however, are deeply concerned about an Iranian government that is in violation of international accords in their attempt to develop a nuclear weapon.”

On June 5: “The Iranians are a great people who deserve to chart their own future, but they are denied their liberty by a handful of extremists whose pursuit of nuclear weapons prevents their country from taking its rightful place amongst the thriving.”

On June 19, Bush spoke of “consequences to the Iranian government if they continue to pursue a nuclear weapon, such as financial sanctions, or economic sanctions. . . .

“Now, whether or not they abandon their nuclear weapons program, we’ll see.”

On July 12: “[T]he same regime in Iran that is pursuing nuclear weapons and threatening to wipe Israel off the map is also providing sophisticated IEDs to extremists in Iraq who are using them to kill American soldiers.”

On Aug. 6 he said “it’s up to Iran to prove to the world that they’re a stabilizing force as opposed to a destabilizing force. After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon.”

From that point on, he started choosing his words more carefully.

Here he is on Aug. 9: “They have expressed their desire to be able to enrich uranium, which we believe is a step toward having a nuclear weapons program. That, in itself, coupled with their stated foreign policy, is very dangerous for world stability. . . . It’s a very troubling nation right now.”

But it certainly didn’t tame the overall message.

Here he is on Aug. 28: “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.

“We seek an Iran whose government is accountable to its people — instead of to leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.”

Oct. 4: “I have made the commitment that I would continue to work with the world to speak with one voice to the Iranians, to the Iranian government, that we will work in ways that we can to make it clear to you that you should not have the know-how on how to make a weapon, because one of the great threats to peace and the world would be if Iranians showed up with a nuclear weapon.”

And, of course, here Bush is at his Oct. 17 press conference:

Q: “But you definitively believe Iran wants to build a nuclear weapon?”

Bush: “I think so long — until they suspend and/or make it clear that they — that their statements aren’t real, yeah, I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it’s in the world’s interest to prevent them from doing so. I believe that the Iranian — if Iran had a nuclear weapon, it would be a dangerous threat to world peace.

“But this — we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”

Sharp-Eyed Bloggers

Blogger Josh Marshall examines Bush’s wording at that press conference and notes:

“It’s no longer the need to prevent the Iranians from getting the bomb. Now it’s the necessity of ‘preventing them from hav[ing] the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.’

“That’s the tell.

“That change is no accident. He wants claims that will survive the eventual revelation of this new intelligence — while also continuing to hype the imminence of the Iranian nuclear threat that his spy chiefs are telling him likely does not exist.”

And here is Cheney a few days later, on Oct. 21, in what is widely considered the height of his saber-rattling, speaking of

“…the inescapable reality of Iran’s nuclear program; a program they claim is strictly for energy purposes, but which they have worked hard to conceal; a program carried out in complete defiance of the international community and resolutions of the U.N. Security Council. Iran is pursuing technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons. The world knows this. . . .

“The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences. The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

As Matthew Yglesias blogs for The Atlantic,

“…the striking thing about this is the extent to which looking back at Cheney’s statement he’s tried very carefully to avoid directly contradicting the NIE while crafting phrases that are clearly designed to cause the listener to draw the precise wrong conclusion.

“It’s not as if Cheney read the NIE and decided he had some reason to believe it was incorrect. Rather, he read it, decided he’d better not contradict it, but also decided that bottom line conclusions about how Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program were inconvenient, and thus decided to talk around that minor point and try to get the American people confused about what’s happening. Stunningly cynical and yes I’m resolving once again to never be stunned.” [emphasis added - J]

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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